IBM Sametime Forum

We have been trying to leverage the "Slides" feature of Sametime meetings, assuming it should take much less bandwith to conduct the meeting, as opposed to screen sharing. I understand there are guidelines in the help stating recommendations for preparing files for conversion. However, asking users to restrict images in powerpoint files to 8 bit 256 colors is not a practical option, especially when many of these presentations are already made.

We have setup a domino 8.0.2/sametime 8.0.2 server on Windows 2003 to test this, as there was updates to the converter in 8.0.2 (added office 2007 support). We are running 7.5.1CF1 in production. The results have been exactly the same in both environments.

We have noticed that more often then not, the conversion of ppt files (pdf and others too) is not suitable for display after being converted. Using the Sametime Print Capture also does not produce adequate results. The best we have been able to do is save the ppt as jpg files, and upload those as slides (requires adding every file individually).

I can take the same ppt file and upload it into Quickr, in QPresent, and the results are much, much better - almost as good as the original ppt file. The difference is Quickr is using a client side activeX control to convert the file to html, whereas Sametime uses a server side java conversion mechanism (I believe).

So a few questions:
1 - Does anyone have a certain procedure to get rich ppt files into Sametime slides with excellent quality?
2 - I've tried hacking the exporter.exe arguments in stconversion\stconvservices.properties file, but have had no success. Is there anything that can be done with that?
3 - Are there any plans on making the conversion engine more robust in future versions of Sametime, like the results obtained in Quickr?
4 - Any other alternatives I am not considering?